Gary Grund

Academic Background

A.B., B.A. Boston College;
M.A., Ph.D. Harvard University

After receiving my Ph. D from Harvard University in 1972 and teaching in Harvard’s English department, I began my career at Rhode Island College in 1973. During the last forty-two years, I have taught twenty-four different courses in the undergraduate and graduate programs in English and in General Education. I have also been the only instructor in ancient Greek and Latin courses ranging from the 101-102 level to graduate-level theses. Since my area of interest and expertise is the Renaissance/Early Modern period, my courses in classical languages and literatures are directly related to my published work in that period which saw the rediscovery of ancient knowledge and the beginning of the modern world.

I have published or contributed to nine books during my career and written articles and reviews that have appeared in journals around the world. In recent years, two books of mine—Humanist Comedies and Humanist Tragedies—were published by Harvard University Press as part of its I Tatti Renaissance Library series, a collection which presents newly edited Latin works from the Italian Renaissance and, in most cases, their very first translations into English. In 2015, an expanded version of my introduction to Humanist Tragedies will be published by Oxford University Press; an extended chapter on “Literarische Formen des philosophischen Humanismus” will also be published by Schwabe Verlag in volume 3 of Ueberweg’s Grundriß der Geschichte der Philosophie: Renaissance und Humanismus.

Over the course of my career, I have tried to insure that my professional, research interests informed my teaching. Ideally, this should always be the case. I have always believed that by expanding my own competence in the library I could expand the horizons of my students in the classroom. Thus, as a final and somewhat unusual note, allow me to mention, first of all, my attempt to enfranchise myself with one quarter of the world’s population by enrolling at Brown in courses in Mandarin Chinese; second, my début in the movies as the voice-over in Blind Date, a film about Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” produced by two of my former students which was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Documentary in 1985; and, third, most recently, my teaching a group of Cistercian nuns New Testament Greek to enable them to read the Bible in the original. Maintaining a close relationship between my traditional scholarship and the practical, compelling demands of my more non-traditional students is at the heart of what I do.